Ancient History
by Giulianna LamannaWhen I was in elementary school, we did a unit where we learned about Native Americans. I don’t recall learning about the Hopi or the Navajo, or the Aztecs or the Maya, or the Inuit or the Aleut. Mainly, we learned about the Iroquois and the Algonquin because we were in upstate NY and the field trip sites were close by. I remember standing in a small wood next to a reconstructed longhouse and being told how the Iroquois used to live. They lived in longhouses and roundhouses, they ate deer, they wore buckskins. Everything was in the past tense. I remember a native woman (from which nation I forgot) coming to talk to us in the library about her way of life, as we all sat “indian-style” on the floor. I raised my hand and asked what she used for toilet paper. She told me, “We just use leaves.” I lowered my hand and thought, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Looking back, that woman was probably “native” in the same way that the people at Plymouth Rock are “settlers.” Regardless, she used Scott or Charmin like all the rest of us. The really unfortunate part of all this is that I remember quite a bit about this unit - I even remember writing my own “Indian creation myth.” (By the way, foxes used to be blue. They turned red when they caught on fire. And then they just kind of stayed that way. Hey, I was ten.) But I don’t remember anyone - not me, not a classmate, not a teacher’s assistant, asking, “If the Iroquois only used to live here, where do they live now?” No one even wondered what happened to them.
We like to think that we’re better people than our ancestors. The whole “progress” bit, and all. When my class got a little older and our teachers finally gave us the information they’d withheld from us - the Trail of Tears, the boarding schools, the reservations, Wounded Knee - we read all the racist propaganda from centuries past, not without a certain amount of smugness. What kind of horrible person would seriously say, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”? Who would suggest that it was right - even noble - to murder people because they were trying to “stay in the stone age” or had “primitive” technology, and what kind of barbaric time in history fueled such hate?
By the way, the last two quotes are from Jenny Tonge (I am so not calling that cold bitch “Lady”), who recently claimed that the Bushmen were “holding the government of Botswana to ransom” by not politely laying down and dying as Botswana continues its noble efforts to force them off their ancestral lands and into resettlement camps. George Monbiot wrote an excellent article about Tonge’s recent speech, and the West’s history (more recent than you might hope) of calling indigenous people “stone-aged” and “primitive,” and comparing them to animals, as an excuse for taking their land.
It’s incomprehensible to me that this is the best excuse we have for genocide: They don’t have iPods. They don’t have plasma TVs. Their technology is so… simple. Can you really say that it’s wrong to exterminate them when they don’t even have iPods? They’re like animals! Which, by the way, also don’t have a right to live happily, because, you know, they don’t have iPods either.
Vintage Victorian racism always makes a comeback when we find ourselves unpleasantly reminded of those few scraps of indigenous people that we still haven’t completely wiped off the map. The last time Anthropik covered this story, in Steve Thomas’s post, Endgame for the Bushmen, an anonymous guest who came on to chastise us for not caring enough about the Bushmen to have been alive during the 1970s had this to say:
BTW, as I understand it, the Kalahari ‘bushmen’ (3 ‘tribes’ actually) are most-closely genetically related to the Australian Aborigines and to the Inuit of the arctic. Some ‘experts’ assert that these are isolatied surviving populations of proto-humans (not “identical” species as us) but, if true, I prefer to believe ‘we’ are actually the proto-humans and that they (might have been) the truely sapient apes.
How truly generous of him.
But possibly the most shocking part of all this is not that we are no better or more enlightened than our ancestors, or that we could possibly justify genocide by accusing the victims of being similar to our unenlightened ancestors (just as our unenlightened ancestors did before us), but for the sheer banality of why the Bushmen may soon become history. Debswana - a partnership between DeBeers and the Botswanan government - wants to dig out the diamonds from beneath the Bushmen land. It’s not like DeBeers actually needs diamonds. They have enormous warehouses where they hold countless diamonds, which, if they were ever to be released onto the market, would make the cost of a diamond drop to what it should be, given the commonality of the stone. That is, almost nothing. No, DeBeers wants to mine more diamonds to stop other companies from mining them first, so they can maintain their iron grip over the industry and keep selling diamonds at an artificially inflated price.
In other words, one of the last truly sustainable cultures on the face of the earth is being destroyed so DeBeers can overcharge you for shiny rocks. And we call them stone-aged. An era in which genocide, war, and oppression is funded by an insatiable greed for pretty-looking rocks is far more worthy of the term “Stone Age” than one in which humans lived in egalitarian tribes. Perhaps we should refer to that one as the “Human Age.” Because whatever age we’re living in now, it’s nothing if not inhuman.
If you want to do something to stop what’s happening in Botswana, remember: it’s not hopeless at all! Botswana is dragging its feet on this issue largely because of the Bushmen supporters worldwide. If you tell everyone you know about what’s happening and encourage them to do the same, we could stop this! Here are some suggestions from the aforementioned article by Steve Thomas, “Endgame for the Bushmen”:
It would … probably be a nice idea not to buy from [DeBeers]. In fact, since DeBeers controls most of world diamond mining, it’s probably best not to buy a diamond at all. And it sure would be a shame if someone hacked their website. (Again, that’s http://www.debeers.com).
DeBeers is part of the AngloAmerican corp. According to George Draffan’s marvelous Endgame website, “Anglo owns 34 percent of De Beers (Worldscope shows 38.7 percent in 1992). De Beers owns 38 percent of Anglo.” Anglo-American’s address is 44 Main St., PO Box 61587, Marshalltown 2107, Johannesburg 2001, South Africa. Their telephone number is (27) 11-638-9111. DeBeers’ main office is in London. I don’t know where.
The phone number for the Botswana embassy is: (202) 244-4990. Their fax number is (202) 244-4164. Their address is 1531-3 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20036. Call them or write to them and express your disgust. Call them again and again and tie up their phone lines. Do the same thing with their fax machines. I guess that’s something. I guess that’s anything.
Something that also might help is donating or otherwise helping Survival International, an organization dedicated to fighting for the independence of tribal peoples.
Survival International also has a petition you can sign.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 27 March 2006 @ 11:53 AM
Great post. I teach Native Studies here in Saskatchewan and I always start my classes with a look at what it really meant to be “primitive” as compared to what we were taught it meant to be primitive. I also flip it around and show them what it means to really be “civilized.” Most people can never get past their defintion of what primitive is however - they define it by technology, rather than sustainability. None of them would ever trade their TV’s for a way of life that seemed to be much more satisfactory to the people living it.
And yes, it is sad that we continue to justify the destruction of Indigenous communities on what is underneath their land - I’ve always loved Derrick Jensen’s words here, something to the effect of how we value production over people.
Comment by Peter D — 27 March 2006 @ 1:37 PM
A spokesperson for De Beers later added,
Comment by Mike Godesky — 31 March 2006 @ 2:12 PM
I raised my hand and asked what she used for toilet paper. She told me, “We just use leaves.” I lowered my hand and thought, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
What I want to know is: How did they clip their toenails?
Comment by Vicky — 30 May 2006 @ 10:45 PM
What is with everyone’s obsession with nail clippers? Jason and Mike brought this up too. They couldn’t believe that one could live without nail clippers. The nail clipper was only invented in 1896; it’s hardly the vital necessity everyone seems to think it is.
Personally, I’ve never used a nail clipper. I’m not even entirely sure how to use one. When my nails get too long, I just use one of my other nails to pick at the lunula (the white part) until it’s shorter. No clipper necessary.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 31 May 2006 @ 11:29 AM
You are either a lying cornmonger, or you have finger nails with the precision and sharpness of Lady Deathstrike.
Those of us without adamantium claws for finger nails, though, sometimes get curious about what people did before nail clippers.
Comment by Mike Godesky — 31 May 2006 @ 5:41 PM
Dammit, you’ve discovered my secret!
Now I shall have to kill you with my plastic gun.
[img]http://www.cinema.com/image_lib/3923_001_thumb.jpg[/img]
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 31 May 2006 @ 6:07 PM
Whenever I try to do that, I end up peeling off too much nail and hurting myself. When were Band-Aids invented?
Comment by Vicky — 31 May 2006 @ 9:27 PM
1920. And yeah… I’ve done that once or twice. But that damage was nothing compared to that time a gang of nail clippers massacred my family.
Bastard nail-clippers.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 31 May 2006 @ 10:07 PM
So apparently, a couple of Arab princes are trying to drive the Hadza off the tribe’s land in Tanzania.
I didn’t much like the article (for example: “They [the women] must have sex with the men on demand; they cannot refuse” - WTF?), but I thought the information provided made it worth linking to.
Comment by Hasha — 23 July 2007 @ 7:45 PM
In the end, all parties say what they will only as excuse: while most people will not give up television for life in a long-house, the American natives will not give up pick-up trucks and whiskey for it either. Whether or not what was done to the American natives was wrong is irrelevant if it is only brought up to justify demands that have nothing to do with a return to their old way of life. Consider the Mexicans who demand the return of their lands–if it is what they truely desire then they should be happy to take it and it should be happilyl be given, but the jobs, architecture, technology and U.S. dollar should be taken away along with the ‘conquerors’ for to accept any other terms would be to admit that the offended races are using the tragedies of their ancestors to their financial advantage and that is, well: dishonorable, disrespectful and frankly, quite sick.
Comment by The Wulf — 13 April 2008 @ 6:05 PM
Wulf, I could hardly disagree more. “Whether or not what was done to the American natives was wrong is irrelevant if it is only brought up to justify demands that have nothing to do with a return to their old way of life.” How do you figure? What does the injustice done to American natives have to do with their old way of life, except that they lived it at the time? These people do not share the same primitivist aspirations we hold, and we have no right to expect them to live like museum pieces for our own betterment. If they want to become part of the global civilization, I can certainly understand that choice, since they currently live in the only place worse than inside that civilization: underneath it. We owe these people something because of the horrible things we did to them. And we have no right whatsoever to tell them what they should or should not do with it. To try to strip them of their autonomy and tell them that we owe them nothing for what we’ve done if they don’t comply with our demands of how they should live, that presents an assertion that I would describe as “dishonorable, disrespectful and frankly, quite sick.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 April 2008 @ 4:50 PM